Dressing for power

A few days into her week-long visit to Zambia in 1979 for the Lusaka summit, Queen Elizabeth got talking to her prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Of the 39 heads of state present at the talks, Liz was there, it is rumoured, to stand up to Thatcher and ensure the PM fell in line with the Queen’s desire to re-establish ties with South Africa.

Only a woman knows the terror of arriving at an event to find someone else wearing an identical outfit, so let’s imagine the Iron Lady sauntering up to the Queen to point out quietly that they had chosen the same dress. The Queen was unmoved, coolly remarking: “Her Majesty never notices what another person is wearing."

Few others have had that luxury. “Clothes are the human soul," says French essayist Michel Tournier, who is quoted in a new and lushly illustrated book, Power & Style: A World History of Politics and Dress.

In its introduction, authors Dominique and Francois Gaulme write: “The most brilliant civilisations first emerged in the warm regions of the valleys of the Indus, Euphrates, and Nile rivers, as well as in China. This is also where clothing and textiles were developed in all their complexity – not to protect the wearer from the climate, but rather to communicate, even more clearly than in writing, the social organisation and distribution of political power."

Published in English and French, under the title Les Habits du Pouvoir – literally The Clothes of Power – it gives an entertaining analysis of power, across monarchies, beginning with Ramses. military regimes, dictators and Western democracy, all through the prism of colour and clothes.

Sub-chapters are devoted to topics such as tattoos, perfume, sandals (designed to prevent a monarch’s divine power leaking into the ground; more than 80 pairs were found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb), and penis sheathes.

Worn today only in Papua New Guinea and the Amazon, the Papuans have adopted the koteka as “a symbol of their struggle for identity against the Indonesian government and its increasingly puritanical dress code".

Colour has been a critical element in establishing identity. Purple was once restricted to the clothing of small, sacred elites; it took upwards of 1200 Murex sea snails to extract 1.4 grams of the precious purple dye.

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Business women are told today to wear a touch of red to job interviews or to heavy power meetings because men are subconsciously drawn to it.

Red was originally regarded as the colour of princes, priests and gods, and Julius Caesar wore red shoes as proof of the claim he was descended from former kings and the goddess Venus. Louis XIV started a trend for red shoes, and the populace then adopted the term talons rouges to describe the court’s snobs.

It wasn’t until Hitler adopted working-class brown that the idea of equality and government by the common man was played out sartorially. Where China’s Mao Zedong wore the blue worker jacket and Italy’s fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, made the peasant black shirt instantly recognisable, Hitler had the “brown cult", meaning the colour of the uniform (produced by the German fashion house Hugo Boss) of his National Socialist party’s notorious bullies, the Brownshirts.

“Brown – the colour of the earth, of the frock of Franciscan friars – was considered ‘a more or less scatological colour’," the authors write, quoting one specialist medieval historian, “. . . which explains why it was never worn by the elite, except in rural society."

But Hitler’s SS (Schutzstaffeln) still wore black, mostly to distinguish themselves from the brown cult. “I know there are some people who get ill when they see the black tunic," SS leader Heinrich Himmler said. “We understand that, and do not expect to be loved by too many people."

Non-colours like black, brown and silver were used not only for their subliminal power, but practicality. It allowed the new military elite to assimilate people of all social classes, eager to join their ranks.

The shift to “dress soft", as Edward VIII (later the Duke of Windsor) called it, quietly perpetuated notions of democratic freedom in America. We are told this new look, which took off after World War II, and was a cocktail of comfortable garments and athletic physique (think JFK), was difficult for European politicians to copy because it was based on the broad shoulders, slim waist and wide trousers of Hollywood movie stars such as Cary Grant.

Today, when United States President Barack Obama casually removes his jacket, he sends a media message. The crisp gleam of his white shirt makes him look vulnerable, like a target, “yet here he is, standing before vast crowds without a jacket, much less armour".

Observations in the book about and from unfamiliar French female politicians – one always made sure to hide her body in a suit, albeit a Chanel – will still cross national barriers, particularly when read in the context of Julia Gillard’s battle to stay upright in her high heels or Germaine Greer’s remarks about the size of the Prime Minister’s bottom when talking about her administrative capabilities on ABC television last March.

Greer may have been giving the PM permission to focus on her work and not her wardrobe, but it inadvertently underlined what Greer wrote in 1999’s The Whole Woman: “Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful."

Meanwhile, will we ever see again powerful men as relaxed about their pale, middle-aged bodies as US president Gerald Ford and French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing were in 1974? They were photographed sipping Planter’s Punch, bare-chested in a pool on the island of Martinique during the Franco-American summit convened over the world’s oil crisis. National security adviser Henry Kissinger and French foreign minister Jean Sauvagnargues were in there, too.

Imagine the ruckus if pictures had emerged of Nicolas Sarkozy, sans stack-heels, with a bikini-clad Angela Merkel, drinking martinis in the pool as they discussed Europe’s debt crisis.